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General Assembly ends budget talks

Daily Press (Newport News, VA)

March 08--General Assembly budget negotiators have broken off talks aiming to reconcile radically different budgets from the House of Delegates and state Senate.

The negotiators didn't believe they could reach agreement in time on the big issue dividing them -- Medicaid expansion -- before the scheduled end of the 2018 session on Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr., R-James City, who is one of the budget negotiators.

"We're just too far apart," he said.

"We did a lot of work on the revenue issues, on language; we pretty much went through the whole budget once, in parts twice," said House Appropriations chairman Chris Jones, R-Suffolk.

"When we got to the big issue, it just became apparent we didn't have the time to have that kind of discussion in time to have a budget for Saturday," he said.

Norment said the discussion of possible middle paths did not come up.

The House budget proposes using federal funds to pay for a version of Medicaid expansion. It would use federal Affordable Care Act funds to cover some 90 percent of the cost of covering all Virginians with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. For a single person, that cut-off is $16,642 a year.

The House proposal includes a work requirement and cost-sharing by some Medicaid enrollees that would require federal approval, similar to recently approved programs in Kentucky and Indiana.

The Senate bill includes no expansion of Virginia's current Medicaid program, which is a 50-50 state and federal match to pay for health care for low-income children; for elderly, blind and disabled Virginians with incomes below 80 percent of the federal poverty line; and for very low-income parents. For a single parent with one child in Newport News and Hampton, that cutoff is $6,200 a year. In much of the state, the cutoff is lower.

The question of Medicaid expansion affects the entire budget because the House budget uses an estimated $371 million savings gained by using Medicaid expansion to fund a wide range of other programs. Two examples are funding 2 percent pay increases for teachers and state employees in fiscal year 2020 and $40 million for a new institute for research and education in cyber technology.

The Senate budget doesn't include the $371 million savings earned from Medicaid expansion.

In addition, the House budget includes a new tax on hospitals to finance the state share of Medicaid expansion, a proposal that's anathema to the one Senate Republican, state Sen. Emmett Hanger, R-Mount Solon, who has said he's open to the idea of expansion.

The impasse leaves two paths forward now. The first is for the General Assembly to vote to extend the session, to give negotiators more time to try to find a compromise, but the state Senate rejected this idea.

The alternative is to call a special session.

Both the House and Senate must do that with a two-thirds vote.

Normally, doing so would require reintroduction of budgets, which would again test whether a minority of House Republicans would join Democrats in support of Medicaid expansion. House Republicans had staunchly resisted Medicaid expansion for four years before the November election nearly cost them control of the body.

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